Southampton, England - The ASCII Consortium today announced the release of
the ASCII Standard Version 1.1, the software specification that assure a
single, universal way to represent English worlwide. Version 1.1 now
supports more than the previous 95 characters, by use of a
patented 'national variant' strategy, where useless characters like { and
} can mean letters in strange countries who aren't satisfied with 26
letters.

"The adoption of ASCII will enables computer users in English-speaking
countries to read and write documents, and this new version may stop
whining from the rest of the world," said Rob Brady, president of the
ASCII Consortium. "This universal representation of text data is a crucial
builind block in the evolution of the Web and e-business."

The ASCII Standard has been adopted and promoted by global industry
leaders. Backers include everyone, including all major governments, all
computer companies everywhere, and practically everyone to have used a
computer everywhere has used the ASCII standard.

Plans for an extended version of ASCII, called "USCII", have now been
placed on hold. Technical Director M. Cimarosti explain "Who cares?
How would we get people to adopt bigger characters than 7 bits? It ain't
gonna happen."

ABOUT THE ASCII CONSORTIUM

The ASCII consortium is a non-profit organisation founded to develop,
extend and promote use of the ASCII standard, which specifies the
representation of text in all software products and standards.
Membership in the ASCII Consortium is open to organizations and
individuals anywhere in the world who support the ASCII Standard and wish
to go to fun conferences. The Consortium is supported entirely through
donations, so get your chequebooks out now! For additional information
about ASCII and the ASCII Consortium, please visit
<http://www.zepler.org//~rwb197/ascii/>.